Christopher Baswell – författare

What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among different institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's ancient epic poem The Aeneid, which held many kinds of appeal for the culture of the Middle Ages. He examines a series of Latin manuscripts of the text which were copied in twelfth-century England but reused and reannotated for three centuries, and shows how their users approached the epic in very different ways. He then charts the progression from the Latin of the original to the vernaculars of the Roman d'Eneas and Chaucer's House of Fame and Legend of Good Women, to show how medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own claim to poetic and even political authority.

What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among different institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's ancient epic poem The Aeneid, which held many kinds of appeal for the culture of the Middle Ages. He examines a series of Latin manuscripts of the text which were copied in twelfth-century England but reused and reannotated for three centuries, and shows how their users approached the epic in very different ways. He then charts the progression from the Latin of the original to the vernaculars of the Roman d'Eneas and Chaucer's House of Fame and Legend of Good Women, to show how medieval vernacular poets used Virgil's prestige to lay their own claim to poetic and even political authority.

Originally published in 1988, this volume contains papers from, and commissioned after, "The Passing of Arthur", a conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in November 1986. No Arthurian story is experienced without some foreknowledge of its end, which the text acknowledges through a complex range of methods. This collection takes this as its point of origin, suggesting that all such narratives concern the passing of Arthur, even indirectly, so the chapters not only look at the death of Arthur but the passing on and development of the Arthurian literature. The figure of Arthur and the Round Table continues to fascinate contemporary readers. This interesting collection presents a wide range of Arthurian studies approaches representing some of the vast scholarship on the genre.